Blogs from Iquitos, Loreto, Peru, South America - page 7

A confession for your reading pleasure: I love Iquitos. I love the people I work with. But sometimes (like today) it’s just really friggin’ hard. Before I came I really thought I anticipated every possible challenge I would face for the next five months, and, thus, be able to better approach these challenges ….but looking back, that was a pretty arrogant thing to assume. I knew communication would be hard. So, I made plans of speaking through my personality and with physical language, and, of course, accompanied by daily studying. I’m doing all of this, but sometimes it’s still hard as hell - sometimes it just really sucks being the one in a room that everyone is laughing at, or being the one everyone avoids talking too because they’re slightly nervous to talk to me in ... read more

The Selva is the Spanish for what we call in english the Jungle. One for the rock fans... After one day in Lima, we boarded Star Peru flight to Iquitos, gateway to the Northern Peruvian selva. Iquitos is the largest city in the world that cannot be reached by road - only by plane and boat. I (Laurent here) slightly regretted not making it by boat but clearly, the 8 days and many changes that it would have required would not have been possible with our heavy schedule. (Yes, still have deadlines to meet - in this case it was to be in Cusco for the Inca trail on the 8th October...) The plane ride already gave us a sign of things to come, with only green underneath when looking through the windows and snaking rivers. ... read more

Yesterday morning myself, Stephy and Jesus were in El Povenir to help the kids in a community project - a community sports day event. Pretty much the same thing for any kind of community sports day - relay races, team events, mini-competitions, and eating contests… But with a cultural twist. Twist #1: Eating Contest…where’s the pie? In planning the day, the kids wanted to have a papaya-eating contest. However, due to premonitions of belly-cramps and the afterward mess of papaya-induced cramps, Stephy steered them towards some bannaners and apples. So, no pie. My buddy Segundo won by shoving 2 bananas and 2 apples in his face in about a minute. And won a hat. And, hopefully, all cramp-free. Twist #2: not really a cultural twist, just funny. There was also the two-legged race. Mi amiga Cledy ... read more

Happy friggin' birthday...to me! I'm a pretty lucky girl. Two years ago I got to celebrate with new friends in Harlow, England. Last year I got to party in our new place on Prescott. This year I got the aforementioned...junglebirthdaydanceparty! The whole day was awesome. It began with a workshop with the kids out in the El Povenir community centre - a mask-making and design session. After three hours of balloon-popping, gesso-exploding craziness and hilarity, we had some lunch and I assumed we would be on our way home...but...alas, no! Yanki (?) (the group's president) asked me to get in the middle of the floor, and all the kids (20ish) made a circle around me, and sang happy birthday to me! I received kisses and birthday wishes from all of them, and then Yanki told me ... read more

Deep in the Amazon Rain Forrest,over 100 miles from any form of civilization and even further than that from a decent coffee (Peru seems to export everything it has) we intrepid explorers donned the sun cream (see, sensible) and ventured where no man has gone before. Well, not quite, but we did make it pretty far into one of the few truly wild bits left in the world. Having shunned the idea of a sanitised ´Jungle lodge´ where about a close as you come to roughing it is realising the pool isn´t cleaned every day we wanted to see just how much we could see in its natural habitat. The only problem with most creatures natural habitats is that they are bloody miles away! Having spent the best part of a day driving to the last ... read more